- Relax ... you don't have to be totally heartless to love the news that that the 58-1 Winnipeg Thrashers team choked in the final of the Telus Cup in Arnprior, losing 6-4 to the Sudbury Nickel Wolves.
No doubt it hurts for the players, but life goes on. The joke is on the minor hockey pooh-bahs in Loserpeg. For years and years, they've tried to stack the deck in order to bring a Canadian midget hockey title to the city.
Winnipeg accounts for more than half of Manitoba's population, but has only two teams in the 12-team provincial Triple-A midget league. Six years ago, it had four, then it was down to three for one season, 2002-03, then it was down to two. After Winnipeg blew it against Sudbury yesterday, it might have to go down to one for next season.
The league standings suggest that the situation has made an absolute joke out of the idea of player development and fair competition. The Thrashers were 40-0 in the regular season with a 268-43 goal differential. The other Winnipeg team was 32-7-1, which likely means that it also went unbeaten against teams from outside the city.
This is being written without knowing anything about the Sudbury team, other than it represents a city of 150,000-some people, not a place that has one team per twice as many people. - For what it's worth, Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports thought the Vikings had a pretty good draft week.
- One hero from the weekend is the athletic director at Rutgers, Robert Mulcahy, for telling Notre Dame to get lost.
Mulcahy walked away from a deal for a football series starting in 2010 after the Notre Dame insisted that Rutgers' home games be played at a neutral site. (Another Big East school, Connecticut, is playing Notre Dame, but its "home" games won't even be in the state of Connecticut.)
Here's hoping Rutgers fills the vacancy on their 2010 schedule with an opponent which has actually won a bowl game this century. - Something everyone might want to check this out further later this morning: The organizers of a MMA event on the Six Nations reserve in Southern Ontario are facing criminal charges. That could be a fun story for a couple of days.
- Thanks, everyone, for not sending word Season 2 of Friday Night Lights came out on DVD last week.
That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.
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1 comment:
I didn't know the story regarding the Winnipeg Midgets, but it doesn't surprise me. You keep seeing more and more of this in minor sports, with associations and leagues twisting themselves into a pretzel trying to win a $25 piece of wood and metal. How many kids in Winnipeg, (and to be fair, in countless other places) have had their sports experience diminished because some jerk on an ago trip decided that it was vital to "load up to make a run"? They tell themselves and everyone else they are doing it for the kids, but that's a load of garbage. These idiots don't care how many kids they leave at the side of the road in their pursuit of glory.
You saw a similar exercise in this region last year. They have now created "AAA" hockey at the Bantam and Midget level, merging a bunch of associations down into five clubs for the purpose of competing in big time tournaments and for trophies like the Telus Cup. It was the ultimate solution in search of a problem -- minor hockey in Eastern Ontario was running just fine as "AA". It wasn't preventing the scouts from looking at kids from the region, and it sure wasn't preventing local kids from playing in the OHL and NHL. But no, it was vital to rub people's egos and create this "super league", regardless of how many kids had their minor hockey experience hurt in the process. Pardon me while I retch.
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